Closure
by WhiteLadyDragon
Summary: A 42-sentence...thingy, regarding snips of L's perspective of his relationship to Erin, and of the future. Companion fic for "Story Of The Century". L x OC.


**_Disclaimer! _****All fictional entities featured/ mentioned in this segment belong to Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata; except Erin Blogger, who I made up for the purpose of this fan fiction.**

**A composite of sentence-thingies I've seen others do and have done myself; may be understood better by those of you who've read "Story of the Century". 40 is unlucky (all us DN fans should know that), and 50 has already been done plenty of times. Why not a nice esoteric number like 42? **

**_CLOSURE_**

1. **Comfort:** In the darkest times, every comforting gesture counts, no matter how awkward its execution: whether it's the offering of tissues, falling asleep during a thunderstorm, offering your hat to wear out in the rain, or even the occasional noogie.

2. **Kiss:** Kissing is, to him, a sign of acceptance, no matter what flaws the kissed may have; Misa was the first in his living memory to kiss him, but Erin was the first that he'd, following Misa's example, had kissed himself, and wished afterwards that if it weren't for her tears, that there could've been just one more before she'd left for good.

3. **Pain:** Breaking one's hand against a stupid bathroom mirror—and the seven years of bad luck that follow—couldn't compare to the hurt that comes from the loss of friends, through betrayal or death…or in this case, a little of both.

4. **Rain:** He was hoping (in vain, he supposes) that she wouldn't find him out in the rain, because inevitably, she'd demand to know what was going on: a question that couldn't be answered if he wanted to keep her out of the firing line of a final showdown that was about to unfold very soon and would end miserably no matter what he did.

5. **Chocolate:** Leave it to a weasel like him to bogart your candy bar while you're trying to show him that someone's there for him.

6. **Happiness:** In a way, perhaps he shouldn't have told her that he would die alone, as he felt far from alone when it happened; as he drew his last breath, he did so in knowing that a few cared about him, his heart attack soothed with the peace that came from the knowledge that he'd, if nothing else, managed to pay back his debt to one—Watari—through fulfilling his expectations, and to the others—Erin, Misa—by giving them a second chance.

7. **Ears:** He has heard the girls talking about him, whether they know it or not, and between Misa's unwavering insistence that he may have a crush on Erin, and Erin's equally unwavering rejection of the idea, he has thought to himself, _Misa Amane is more astute than she is given credit for. _

8. **Name:** The day Erin visits the animal shelter to adopt a furry friend, she picks a scrawny black kitten—with Farley commenting that he'd always thought of her as more of a dog person, but hey, it's not his pet peeve—with the biggest, sharpest eyes she had ever seen in a cat, and to everyone's utter bemusement, christens him "Lawliet."

9. **Death:** _It doesn't matter if you're a saint or a sinner, a genius or a fool, a prince or a pauper, a winner or a loser; we're all people, _she muses in the waiting room of the psychiatric unit, _and we're all headed for the same place…probably the closest to real justice that we'll ever know. _

10. **Touch:** It's unfortunate that he's clumsy when it comes to touching, since all he was trying to do was hold her face; what's more unfortunate was when he heard her gag and realized the full extent of how much she no longer trusted him.

11. **Weakness:** A dislike for loneliness is a core weakness they both share: she hates it when people won't listen to her, and he can't stand being alone in general; the difference is in their personal awareness of their respective weaknesses: she had always been aware of hers, but it's only when he finds a little relief from loneliness (in her, Light, Misa, anyone on the team) that he discovers his.

12. **Tears:** She took it the wrong way when he told her that it irritates him to see people cry; it irritates him mostly because it leaves him frustrated with his inability to make it stop, especially if he might've had something to do with why they were crying in the first place, such as in her case…quite frequently.

13. **Freedom:** In hindsight, as much as she hated the restrictions imposed on her during her stay, she can't help but wonder whether he, the imposer, had even less freedom than she had, tied down and crushed by burdens that she—or any everyman—could never see, much less understand.

14. **Life:** She is amazed not only by how precious and fragile life is, but how she had never actually appreciated it until she saw it slip away right in front of her, whether by (literally) someone else's hand or by (again, literally) its own hand.

15. **Jealousy:** There are many pros to having Matsuda mind her when needed, particularly before and after his assignment as Misa's manager (i.e., he keeps her preoccupied, which in turn keeps Matsuda preoccupied, and he has to utilize everyone on the team in some way), and as far as he's concerned, the pros outweigh the cons (i.e., Matsuda is rather lax as a chaperone, not to mention how he feels odd, unpleasant things when she'll reproach him for _anything_ he says and does without hesitation, but will rush to Matsuda's defense when _he_ messes up with the same lack of hesitation).

16. **Hands:** If he had to pinpoint an exact moment in time when his infatuation for her spiked, it was probably when she held his hand at the movie theater, and how in spite of her obvious, initial unwillingness to do it, she'd squeezed it several times, as though trying to silently remind him that he was supposed to respond somehow.

17. **Taste:** He decides that the salt and bitterness of her tears has been and will be the worst thing he's ever tasted as he takes an extra serving of cake in hopes of washing it off his lips with sugar and icing.

18. **Devotion:** Once you start to love someone, you can't stop loving them no matter what they'd do to hurt you, even if you feel as though you hate them; and the way she sees it, if she can find it in her to love two crazy serial killers and the insane detective who'd been chasing after them, then there's no one that isn't capable of being loved.

19. **Home:** She is incredibly fortunate to have a stable home and a family waiting for her, and he believes it best that she be with those who will take care of her when he's gone, rather than have her be there when he departs, being left to fall apart when it happens while he won't be able to help her.

20. **Confusion:** Erin remained a nuisance to him until the end, though not always in the sense she had assumed; he couldn't put a price on the confounded look on her face when he told her that he liked her.

21. **Fear:** More than she fears the possibility of a new notebook arriving in the human world and the emergence of a new Kira, more than she fears her inability to do anything if something like that did happen, she fears that she may be the only one on the outside whose fear has not turned and mutated into another case of the incurable pandemic of Stockholm's Syndrome parading across the globe in the guise of religious zeal.

22. **Bonds:** This has been the first—and last—case in which he had ever decided to step out of the safety of the shadows and show his face, knowing from the start that he'd be risking his life in doing so; but the cost of his decision turns out to be heftier than simply that as he sits alone in the empty HQ, reflects on the unexpected bonds he has forged—and subsequently lost—and discovers what true loneliness feels like.

23. **Gift:** The significance of her acceptance of him as a friend may have been lost to her, but after cake, he couldn't have asked for a better birthday present.

24. **Smile:** She only saw him smile once: right before she left him, after handing him the harshest reality check in the aftermath (…then again, he never reacted to anything in a way that any normal person ought to).

25. **Innocence:** While she would agree with Misa's frequent accusations of L's "perversion," she wonders now if he himself was even aware of what perversion is; conversely, he's noticed that in spite of her loud mouth and tendency to swear often, she has a fairly innocent worldview that breaks a little with every development this case undertakes, until she no longer knows just what kind of world they live in when it's all over.

26. **Hero:** Light Yagami and L Lawliet were both, in essence, mad geniuses who were selfish in nature and hurt far more people than they helped (in the name of what, exactly? Justice?) and wound up sharing the same fate as L said they would long ago, but if one defines a hero as someone who spurs another to make something great out of their life, then maybe it wouldn't be inaccurate to call them two of the greatest heroes she has ever known or will ever know.

27. **Memory:** Memories are all she has left: some to torment her, and others to, when she lets them, soothe the torment and help her to forgive the some.

28. **Run:** She was the type who mostly ran to get where she was going, no matter what her motivation was (sometimes with no apparent motivation at all), as though determined to get whatever she's after before losing her nerve at the last minute: a trait that, for all of its worth, he often found rather annoying, as well—especially when it worked against him.

29. **Music:** Unlike the ones she sings with Matsuda to their foreign pop songs on the radio on the ride back from school—an odd harmony of carefree countertenor with nasally contralto—they have a duet that goes on until the end: a harmony established paradoxically from the constant _dis_harmony of their mindsets, the conflict of their wills, the clash of his terse articulated vocabularly with her sputtering, hotheaded and often _very _colorful New York vernacular, the fact that there's almost nothing in the world for them to agree on, not even when he voices to her out in the rain the exact opinion she's had of him since day one (that just about everything he says is nonsense).

30. **Promise:** He was the first to demonstrate any genuine belief in her without calling her high afterwards, and even though he let her down, she swears to herself every day that she will not do the same.

31. **Silence:** At times, he feels as if there were a few more things he probably should've said, but ultimately decides no; when he thanked her for everything, he told her everything that she needed to know.

32. **Forgotten:** Sometimes she wishes she could forget everything, as easily as it was for Misa to have forgotten everything when her notebook was destroyed…only to be struck with the notion that it wouldn't be right if no one was left to remember the humans, the _boys_, behind the names "L" and "Kira."

33. **Farewells:** He had already lost Light and Watari and departed with Misa without so much as a good-bye; he didn't want to make the same mistake with his last friend, especially not on such hateful terms, and as he listened to her walk out with Matsuda without replying, it became the only time he could recall when he wished he hadn't had the last word.

34. **Laugh:** He'd tried to use horseplay to distract her from what was about to happen, in almost the same way she's used it to distract herself, but he knew from the instant she'd started laughing at the bell that he had failed…no, he'd failed the instant she'd found him outside.

35. **Lies:** L was a chronic liar, because it helped him to achieve his objectives and to shake people off his trail; for instance, though he did like Misa (Second Kira or not) and had been caught a bit off-guard by that kiss, he'd lied when he said he could _fall in love with _Misa, because he saw Erin watching everything from the inside of the bathroom door.

36. **Overwhelmed:** It's a good thing that he can suppress his emotions when needed; otherwise, he might've ran straight up to Light to kick him until he'd bleed for writing her name down in the notebook, fake or otherwise, and considering the look on Light's face to see him still alive, he had already dealt a fatal blow just by showing up.

37. **Search:** When she came to Japan, she was only searching for a story that would finally get people to take her seriously; what she found was an epic of the ages that can't be told, but rather _shown_, in everything she does.

38. **Hope:** In the presence of evil, the same amount of good must also exist somewhere, even if she has to go look hard for it; it's a shame that Light couldn't see that for himself, because in becoming Kira and murdering criminals in "the hopes of creating a new world," he took hope away from many people in his presence and his absence.

39. **Unknown:** She realizes that even after all that time she's spent with him, she hardly truly knows him at all; then again, seeing as he was supposed to be one of the world's greatest mysteries (who was, oddly enough, a mystery who solved other great mysteries), maybe it's not that surprising?

40. **Journey:** Out of obligation as a friend and officer, Matsuda drives back at the first opportunity he gets to rush back in through the doors of the monitor room to find L working and deliver the apology she never gave to him herself, to which L smiles to himself and replies, "I regret to inform you, Mr. Matsuda, that your coming to tell me this was an unnecessary waste of your time. But thank you."

41. **Technology:** A little over a year after the case, just when she figured she'd heard the last from any of them, she almost falls out of her seat when she logs on to her Facebook™ page to find that someone has visited her page and left her a message: someone named _Touta Matsuda. _

42. **Talk:** "I'm—I'm sorry. I should've found a way to contact you sooner. Then maybe you wouldn't have…" "Oh, I can still use it, Matsu, it's okay, I did it to myself," she insists, putting down the pen with which she'd been signing the check for their meal so she can loop an arm around Matsuda. "It really means a lot for you to just be here, though...bringing me up to speed and all. I can't even tell you."


End file.
